Is Obama the New Blair – and just what Hillary deserves?

There’s nothing a BBC reporter loves more than breathlessly to announce yet another set of Obama victories. For Obama – or Barack as they often prefer familiarly to call him - is pre-eminently one of them.

Of course the last time a charismatic young orator swept into the White House, he was tragically shot too soon to disappoint. But President Kennedy still had enough time to drag the United States firmly into Vietnam and preside over the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  

We, too, had our soulful, magnetic leader who convinced (many of) us that he would be the “servant, not the master”, a new type of leader, “whiter than white”.

Obama stands on the plank of an “ethical foreign policy to restore America’s moral place in the world”.

So did Blair – his “ethical foreign policy” was delivered by his not-so-trusty Robin Cook who proudly stated in 1997: “We will not permit the sale of arms to regimes that might use them for internal repression or international aggression.”

That particular ethical dimension was delivered in the form of warplanes to the Indonesians who were busy committing genocide in East Timor (a few years earlier Cook had criticised the Major government for even considering such a sale). New Labour also allowed weapons to be sold to poor African countries such as Tanzania and South Africa, and later of course there was Iraq - though in fairness Blair was right on Kosovo.

There may well have been justification for all of these policies – in the case of weapons sales, the higher ethical imperative was British jobs. And that is exactly the point. What appears black and white in opposition, or on the stump in a drafty school hall in Iowa (i.e. when you’re after votes) suddenly turns into very grey shades when in power.

It’s great political poetry – and a tremendous load of old bollocks
 
The sad truth is that states run their foreign policies primarily in their own self-interest, only very occasionally tempered by higher principles foisted on them by popular protest or the media.

Will Obama, for example, end the United States’ famously protectionist farm policy, which penalises poor countries and encourages Columbian farmers to grow cocaine because they’re not allowed to sell oranges to the Land of the Free (lest they compete too freely with the sleek citrus farmers of Florida?)

Of course he won’t. Obama’s speeches are great political poetry. And like much poetry - and indeed much politics - it’s all the most tremendous load of old bollocks.

As is Obama’s claim that he wants an end to the “bickering and partisan ways of Washington”. His oft-repeated statement that he stands for “the future over the past” is nothing if not a very partisan barb aimed unerringly at Hillary.

Just what Hillary deserves…

You can understand Americans warming to Obama. He seems a genuinely nice kind of guy. They want a counterpoint to the many economic and foreign policy blunders of the Bush years. And an Obama presidency might draw a post-racial line under America’s often fraught history.

But it nonetheless reflects poorly on the American electorate – and a few others – that they fall for it.  I suspect that if they get their President Obama – or President Barack as the BBC will want him known – he may prove to have raised expectations so high that it will all be terribly disappointing. But then that’s the oldest political game in the book, is it not?
 
It’s all enough to make you feel sorry for Hillary – arghhh, hold that thought – maybe he’s just what she deserves

Phillip Oppenheim